"accesses or exceeds authorization to access" Does giving someone a computer and the admin password give them authorization? I'd say yes, but I havn't had any legal schooling.
"3) intentionally or knowingly and without authorization gives or publishes a password"
That sounds a lot like what the school staff did, but I'm sure they just unintentionally gave out or published a password, whatever that's good for.
Yes, they should be punished, not going to say how much until I know now much they've received already. Unfortunately the stories of both sides greatly vary. CNN: the school said the kids were given many detentions and ISS and had their computers taken away and the pwords changed while cutusabreak.org comments say they were given a single detention and the parents were not informed why, just a "your student got detention" card in the mail a couple days later and the computers were just reimaged to remove the games and ichat, no change of pword. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that matters is when the situation was explained to the parents, I think it's still called the parent-teacher conference. You do NOT give a serious punishment to a student without consulting and/or fully informing in writing their parents/guardians first, unless it's drugs then you turn it over to the police. I believe a parent giving a "talking to"(/woodshed beating) to their kid and explaining what they did and why they need to stop doing will carry more weight than someone at school giving them detention every day. It's possible the person giving them punishments had a bad reputation at the school and was not taken seriously, every school has at least one, if you're not lucky. It's possible the students thought the punishment for playing a game or using IM in class was a detention and accepted the risk of getting caught. Some may have stopped if the school started using words like "felony charges" and "criminal record" after the first or third offence, these were kids installing ichat, not "smoke'n up the whacky weed", they might have stopped. But there was to testimony ubder oath in court and we'll probably never know what really happened, unless someone gets a book deal.
Which means the IP is only as good as whoever the RIAA got it from. I'm sure all the info given by the ISP is fact. The question of credibility is how reliable is whoever gave the initial list to the RIAA. Since most IPs are in use, when the RIAA gives an IP to an ISP they're going to get a name. As far as the RIAA and ISP know the data given to them is correct, but we don't know about the "paid informant" who gave the initial list to the RIAA, they could have taken the IPs off comments on someone's anti-RIAA blog so they can get a little money for the list if they get paid by the IP.
"If my car goes through a speed camera and it nabs the number plate"
The value of an IP address is probably much less than the value of a photo from a police camera. A camera gives them photographic evidence, usually accepted as reliable in court. Yes, it's possible to alter pictures, but then they'd have get the make, model, color and plate right. If it used text recognition only and recorded only the numbers&letters, no photo saved, then you might have a chance of getting off, but not against a photo, unless the timestamp is off, maybe blinking 12:00AM. What the RIAA probably has is a piece of paper with text or screen capture and the lawyer probably doesn't even know where it came from or who created it and are both easily faked.
"Better still would be getting a judge to set some reasonable numbers for the damages."
good idea, listen to what the Constitution says
"In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."
-and-
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
I don't know if "Suits at common law" refers to civil cases or just criminal cases, but I believe "nor excessive fines imposed" is there to prevent people from being sued for every last penny they have, say $150,000 for a song.
How about defaultuser@kazaa.com from 68.163.90.13?
It looks more like the judge was preventing her from being lead into a guilty plea or lucrative settlement by some fast-talking RIAA lawyer than defending her. There's a difference between an officer of the court defending the legal rights of a defendant who appeared to be not fully knowledgeable on the subject and acting as her defence attorney. I do like her possible cover story of viruses, probably kazaa spyware, and having someone take it out to be cleaned and the hdd gets wiped in the process. Who knows if the alleged mp3 collection was copied before the hdd was wiped or even if it was really wiped. If she's no longer the owner of the PC, the chances of the RIAA getting posession of it are even closer to zero. Then the only question is the credibility of the logs the RIAA probably bought from someone else. The only way to prove some has "infringing" files would be to examine their PC and I have no idea how easy of not it is to obtain someone's property for a civil suit.
Does IP still mean Internet Protocol or has it been overtaken by intelectual property? It almost seems like the RIAA is trying to combine them. What does the RIAA lawyer mean when they ask: "Does your computer have IP on it?"
Now if I wanted to hide my browsing activites I'd use portable Firefox or VM running off a usb drive or flash card, preferably the same kind as my digital camera or other flash card using device so I'd have a reason to have it. Then I'm sure I could find a way to easily hide in or around my home if I really had to. And there are always the file erasing programs, 50 passes on a 128mb usb drive shouldn't take that long.
You'd think if someone knew they were doing something illegal they might know enough to try to hide it. But not everyone does that and IE's default setting of 10% of the disk for temp files will provide more than enough evidence for anyone examping the PC.
I never thought I'd say this, but what about: "or get a Mac?" I'm guessing OSX and safari store history and temp files differently than Windows and IE. It's almost as if they're saying if you want to get away with illegal online activites all you have to do is NOT use IE.
"1 lifeguard for, say, every 45 kids at the pool, it's hard to watch them all at the same time."
At least 50:1 of kids to lifeguards. I had the privlage of working at the city pool during a few highschool summers, as the cook in the refreshments stand, so I didn't have to be anywhere the water area. I never cared much for swimming and once you work there and see what ends up in the pool, you don't want to have to touch the water with a 10' pole. "Somebody made a floaty" It was/is an olympic size pool or very close with 6 lifeguard stands around the pool with 2 on "safety patrol" walking around the pool grounds and the other 2 at the first aid station. Three times as week was day camp day, all the summer day camps in the city showed up, close to 2500 kids. The camp counselors were suposed to watch their groups when they weren't in the pool, but they never did. There were other non-lifeguard staff there so it ended up being about 200:1 of kids running around to staff. And while in the pool they like to play the who can hold their breath the longest making it even more difficult for keep an eye on everyone. The only advantage was the deeper water was blocked off and only had the 3' diving board and slide and only one person was allowed to use each at a time and there was a lifeguard at each 1:1 in the "deep end" so it would not have been possible for there to be an unsupervised kid in 12'6" of water. Even for pools of mostly 4' water underwater cameras would improve underwater visability, try looking into a pool with mid-day summer sun glare in your face, even with sunglasses. But you'd have to have to hire someone to stare at the monitors all day, once there's a budget to buy the system.
"Somehow I'm happy to accept cinema adverts yet not DVD adverts."
Probably has something to do with the theater previews being for future releases while the DVD content doesn't change and you end up with ads for something released many months ago. Its a carry over from VHS/Betamax, the only reason we're not used to it as with theaters is because they're new. The first time I saw this was with Shrek2, released less than a year ago while my oldest DVDs, SW ep1 and The Matrix do not. It's something movie studios just recently tried and it seems people are not liking it.
"In addition it's not against the law to get ripped off, which a consumer can always claim."
I wasn't "pirating" I guess I was just getting ripped off by those people who sold me a subscription to use BitTorrent claiming it was "100% legal". I remember reading about the RIAA suing someone because her daughter was using a paid version of Kazaa and thought it was legal because she was paying for it. If you use that claim you'd probably need receipts or credit card records to prove you realy were paying for it. In which case you'd probably just have to promise to delete the "infringing" material.
How about Simpsons a solution? When the town(city) gets too poluted(flooded) everyone packs up and moves 5mi down the road. (accual distance my vary by location)
When does it become cheaper scrap what was there and just start over somewhere else? 80% of the city flooded under as much as 20ft of water, billions in damages, possibly 9 weeks to pump out, not rebuild, just to make the ground dry again. By that time most of the structures will be even less safe for human inhabitation than they are now. Ok, this may not be popular with the New Orleans and southern LA residents, but rebuilding everything as it was is not going to address the problem of the river being diverted and not being allowed to flood, depositing sediment rebuilding up the land. I remember reading about how the nile used to flood in ancient history class, how did the Egyptions deal with seasonal river flooding until they built the Aswan High Dam? I think they were dealing with the floods for at least a couple thousand years. The population on the banks of the river was never that high, maybe we should take a hint, but waterfront property has such a high value, until it's under water. Unfortunately it usually takes a big disaster for people to really see the problem and change things, if you've ever seen "Modern Marvels Engineering Disasters" there are at least 12eps covering at least 3 disasters each. That's at least three doven things that took something reallly bad happening before it was changed for the better.
I'm guessing people are so used to having everything work they don't think about how it works, electricity and batteries. The wind and the rain and whatever the wind is blowing may or may not have that much effect on the signal sent by the cell phone safely tucked away in your pocket, but it will have an effect on the cell tower as it's being whipped around by the wind and random flying objects, I don't think cell towers can correct for doppler shift of the TOWER. I don't know if cell phone towers have backup power, but it can't last that long when the power lines connecting to it are blown away like a house of cards. Fortunately the only loss of power I've had to deal with was the blackout in Aug 2003 and then only for a few hours. For some reason I was home at the time and since I had nothing else to do I moved my fan and bigger UPS over to the tv and watched to news coverage of the blackout, interestingly being broadcast to an audience who could not watch.
"and the infrastructure that SUPPORTS the phone"
of course no service provider is going to build for 100% usage, they only install enough lines for average use on an average day, I'll guess 35%, so when close to 100% of the customers need to make calls, usually when something bad happens only 35% can get an open line or it creates a buffer tower's OS crashes and no one can make a call.
I hope this doesn't sound like I'l trolling, but I heard many times of the mandatory evacualtion of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. When the governor orders the evacuation of an area when taking about a class 5 hurricare that would be a good time to listen and cover your home with enough plywood as possible and head for the hills or a designated shelter. If you don't listen you're going to be sitting on top of your house waiting for a coast guard helicopter to find you or clinging to a utility pole getting bitten by hundreds of fire ants also looking for shelter there and biting you until they win and you fall off. Yes, the LA gov said that on tv.
"or when something gets put back by a consumer" yes, that would be very useful for finding the 'relocated' inventory. If you've ever worked in one of those big food stores you know it's true.
Back when I was in HS I worked a few summers at the local A&P, one of those big food stores for those not in the northeast. There was an excess of cashiers, for some reason they didn't hire people for other depts so a couple times a week some of us were temporarily reassigned for restocking the shelves. There was this one dept manager who for some reason didn't understand that when some customers decided they didn't want something, before they got to the checkout line, they would leave the item on the nearest shelf and she would blame us for not putting things in the right place she found a can of soup next to the peanut butter. It would have been nice to be able to walk down the isle with a scanner and have it beep whenever it detected an item in the wrong place or sensors in the shelves send a report "item '10lb frozen turkey' in isle 8 section 1 shelf 3(behind the 2L soda bottles)". And maybe a scanner for the impulse buy racks next to the checkout lines, it was funny to see how people whold try to hide things they didn't want in there instead of simply giving it to the cashier and saying "I don't want this anymore" or leaving it on the floor next to the shelves where it would be easily noticed by any of the store's staff.
Same with libraries, but they have signs asking you not to reshelf books, but well hidden books don't start to smell bad after a few days. They don't care where you put the book when you're done with it, on the empty bottom shelf or on the floor or on a table, but not back on the shelf where there's a chance it might be put in the wrong place.
That depends if you have the right paperwork. There are things called controled substances.
You can't legally drive a car or fly a plane without a license. You can't get some drugs without a perscription, in which case they're know as medication. You can't longer launch model rockets without a permit, think you need one from the FAA now. You have the right to bear arms, but it's illegal in enough states to do so without a gun owners license or permit or whatever the local ordinance calls them. Phone taps are illegal, but law enforcement and maybe P.I.s can get legal documents saying they can. So if someone thought their significant other was cheating and hired a PI, the PI might be able to get the necessary paperwork to use that or similar software. With the right paperwork, and paying the fees for it, you can do just about anything you want. It seems there people didn't have the right paperwork which it illegal. There's also the chance they were wanted for something else we're not being told about.
I didn't realize it was this bad, from m-w.com hack 4 a : to write computer programs for enjoyment b : to gain access to a computer illegally that's 4 a&b almost implying a connection: "to write computer prograams to gain access to a computer for enjoyment"
dictionary.com is a little better 2 Informal.
a. To write or refine computer programs skillfully.
should be: hack, v 1 to (skillfully) modify
to someone somewhere at some time this would be illegal: "I hacked my friend's computer to install another 5.25" floppy drive"
the definition of "hack" should be split into "hack" and "haxor" with "hack" getting the good parts and "haxor" getting the bad parts, the script kiddies.
In TOS he was 30 playing a 20-something Ensign Chekov, now he's almost 70, how's he going to play a 20 or 30-something Lt Chekov?
Yes, I've probably seen every episode and movie of TOS and B5 with Koenig in them and his work is very good. I just have to throw out the idea that it could be a bring in the big names stunt as was done with Enterprise in an attempt to draw back more viewers after it was moved to Friday where it had to compete with SG-1, not a good idea since enough people wanted to watch both. Is he going to stay with New Voyages or will it be a few guest staring appearances for the show's publicity?
"If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they?"
He can blacklist all he wants but we all know that most "piracy" and all pre-release "leaks" are inside jobs, NOT purchased. It happens when an CD or DVD or game disk sweatshop worker making maybe 50cents a day picks a slightly defective copy of something scheduled to be released next month out of the trash and sells it for a weeks wages to a group who uploads it to their warez site. Maybe a label was slightly out of place making it unsellable but the disk still works. Or some kid working in BestBuy or some other store pockets one that was damaged during shipping, enough items are, and is in too bad condition to even be sold as an open item. Or someone in a game rental store brings in their laptop and rips the disk during a break. Then they may sell their copy to some warez club who ends up with a copy of something 2-3days before store release. Can't forget the part-time teenager or even theater supervisor/manager working in the projector room in a theater who sets up a tripod and records it when the theater gets the film a few days before release to make sure it works. It's not "piracy" it's "employee theft" and employee theft happens because they feel exploited by their company. So the RIAA has disgruntled customers, employees and executives. (for not squeezing every last penny out of the customers) Why do they just disband already? I guess their making money, just not more money.
re-run yes, that has a lot to with the iPod shuffle appearing to select(or not) some songs more then others in full random mode, but the subject says iTunes so I'm a bit confused. Maybe it's a hint that the iTunes prices should be increased to at least $1.49 so it will be cheaper to buy CDs and that guy will get more business. Sorry, there is no Homer Simpson advertising the Leftorium so it has enough business on the last possible day to survive. A Christian rock CD store, I wonder what state he's in and if he has Faith+1's murr alblum. (South Park)
$1.49 or make even $2.50 a track, this must be that "price flexibility" I read about last week. No, this is not price flexibility, it's a price hike, the only thing flexing will be the pockets of the record folks as they will with even more money. They already get 70% of the sale someone else makes, what more do they want, apparently a lot. "But think about the artists!" I have no idea how their contracts work. Do they get a set amount or a percentage of sales if they don't get a % of sales, I don't want to hear the RIAA whining about the artists not getting paid, esp the ones with million dollar lifestyles. Maybe if we put it in terms the general public will understand people will(might) listen. An increase from 99c to $1.49(at least) is a 50% price increase. People like 50% off sales, how about at 50% more sale? If they want to raise prices, maybe they can improve the track quality. The reason I don't buy downloadable music is the bulk of it is only 128kbps, but about increasing that by 50%, more would be nice, but that would be bad for someone's profit. The ipod doesn't 'have' to hold X thousand songs, yes the higher number is better for marketing, but lets be realistic.
"For people that use it 8 hours a day, and recharge daily... that's a considerably different matter. But that's not what I do."
yes, people should read the manual first, the commercials don't tell all, that's what the manuals are for. I got a 2gen 4gb mini in feb05, tha manual says battery life will varry depending on use and I recall reading somewhere that the estimated life is 500 charge cycle. I don't have and have never seen manual for a 1st of 2nd gen ipod. But we can't forget that people no longer research what they're going to buy, even the several hundred dollar purchases. Didn't all this start because some people in NY started complaining because their batteries started to show signs of age after 18months?
Hardware failure is around 2-5% so there are probably a couple people who really have faulty batteries and should get free replacements.
"and serious download penetration into the living room for there to be money in it now."
It's called "on demand" enough cable and satellite providers offer it. What needs to be determined is the value of this to the consumer and the content producers and providers. Most of it is $5 for 24hrs of use, I and I'm sure enough other paying consumers think that price is a little high, considering for 3 of those you can buy a new DVD. It all comes down to pricing and availability/ convenience. How much is it worth to be able to quickly obtain a movie once? The providers may say $4.99, but the consumer may say, "I'm only going to watch it once, I'll give you 99c for it." There you have a consumer willing to pay, but considers the posted prices unreasonable.
What happens when someone records it when it's on tv, non-pay-per-view, and the legal time-shifted copy they have becomes corrupted, can they legally download another? What happens if the copy you made gets corrupted, can you download a recording someone else made because yours doesn't work anymore or what if it's not of the highest quality and want to use someone else's version? Or I have it on VHS and can't afford a tv card but want to watch it on my pc? Yes, lots of questions and the industry's answer is sue now, ask questions, maybe in court.
I'm going to stick to my tv/pvr card for tv and movies, if it's on tv I can make a legal recording for myself and used CDs for my listening pleasure.
offtopic- Anyone know of a place selling used CDs of the Indiana Jones soundtracks, not the cheap "trilogy" collection or imported eds? They're not even on ebay
Slashdot Mirror
So how long until the Daily Show becomes a regular source?
yes, boycott until they can't use the ibooks anymore and have to sell them off for $50 and hope it doesn't end with a riot.
"Comments are owned by the Poster." -small print at the bottom of the page
= 13460185
Nice sig, where'd you find it? I remeber posting that phrase yesterday. too lazy for a link- http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160849&cid
I don't care, I'm not the RIAA on a DMCA high, use it all you want.
"accesses or exceeds authorization to access"
Does giving someone a computer and the admin password give them authorization? I'd say yes, but I havn't had any legal schooling.
"3) intentionally or knowingly and without authorization gives or publishes a password"
That sounds a lot like what the school staff did, but I'm sure they just unintentionally gave out or published a password, whatever that's good for.
Yes, they should be punished, not going to say how much until I know now much they've received already. Unfortunately the stories of both sides greatly vary. CNN: the school said the kids were given many detentions and ISS and had their computers taken away and the pwords changed while cutusabreak.org comments say they were given a single detention and the parents were not informed why, just a "your student got detention" card in the mail a couple days later and the computers were just reimaged to remove the games and ichat, no change of pword. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that matters is when the situation was explained to the parents, I think it's still called the parent-teacher conference. You do NOT give a serious punishment to a student without consulting and/or fully informing in writing their parents/guardians first, unless it's drugs then you turn it over to the police. I believe a parent giving a "talking to"(/woodshed beating) to their kid and explaining what they did and why they need to stop doing will carry more weight than someone at school giving them detention every day. It's possible the person giving them punishments had a bad reputation at the school and was not taken seriously, every school has at least one, if you're not lucky. It's possible the students thought the punishment for playing a game or using IM in class was a detention and accepted the risk of getting caught. Some may have stopped if the school started using words like "felony charges" and "criminal record" after the first or third offence, these were kids installing ichat, not "smoke'n up the whacky weed", they might have stopped. But there was to testimony ubder oath in court and we'll probably never know what really happened, unless someone gets a book deal.
Which means the IP is only as good as whoever the RIAA got it from. I'm sure all the info given by the ISP is fact. The question of credibility is how reliable is whoever gave the initial list to the RIAA. Since most IPs are in use, when the RIAA gives an IP to an ISP they're going to get a name. As far as the RIAA and ISP know the data given to them is correct, but we don't know about the "paid informant" who gave the initial list to the RIAA, they could have taken the IPs off comments on someone's anti-RIAA blog so they can get a little money for the list if they get paid by the IP.
"If my car goes through a speed camera and it nabs the number plate"
The value of an IP address is probably much less than the value of a photo from a police camera.
A camera gives them photographic evidence, usually accepted as reliable in court. Yes, it's possible to alter pictures, but then they'd have get the make, model, color and plate right. If it used text recognition only and recorded only the numbers&letters, no photo saved, then you might have a chance of getting off, but not against a photo, unless the timestamp is off, maybe blinking 12:00AM.
What the RIAA probably has is a piece of paper with text or screen capture and the lawyer probably doesn't even know where it came from or who created it and are both easily faked.
"Better still would be getting a judge to set some reasonable numbers for the damages."
good idea, listen to what the Constitution says
"In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."
-and-
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
I don't know if "Suits at common law" refers to civil cases or just criminal cases, but I believe "nor excessive fines imposed" is there to prevent people from being sued for every last penny they have, say $150,000 for a song.
How about defaultuser@kazaa.com from 68.163.90.13?
It looks more like the judge was preventing her from being lead into a guilty plea or lucrative settlement by some fast-talking RIAA lawyer than defending her. There's a difference between an officer of the court defending the legal rights of a defendant who appeared to be not fully knowledgeable on the subject and acting as her defence attorney.
I do like her possible cover story of viruses, probably kazaa spyware, and having someone take it out to be cleaned and the hdd gets wiped in the process. Who knows if the alleged mp3 collection was copied before the hdd was wiped or even if it was really wiped. If she's no longer the owner of the PC, the chances of the RIAA getting posession of it are even closer to zero. Then the only question is the credibility of the logs the RIAA probably bought from someone else. The only way to prove some has "infringing" files would be to examine their PC and I have no idea how easy of not it is to obtain someone's property for a civil suit.
Does IP still mean Internet Protocol or has it been overtaken by intelectual property? It almost seems like the RIAA is trying to combine them. What does the RIAA lawyer mean when they ask: "Does your computer have IP on it?"
how about a podcast, sounds a little more legal?
Now if I wanted to hide my browsing activites I'd use portable Firefox or VM running off a usb drive or flash card, preferably the same kind as my digital camera or other flash card using device so I'd have a reason to have it. Then I'm sure I could find a way to easily hide in or around my home if I really had to. And there are always the file erasing programs, 50 passes on a 128mb usb drive shouldn't take that long.
You'd think if someone knew they were doing something illegal they might know enough to try to hide it. But not everyone does that and IE's default setting of 10% of the disk for temp files will provide more than enough evidence for anyone examping the PC.
I never thought I'd say this, but what about: "or get a Mac?" I'm guessing OSX and safari store history and temp files differently than Windows and IE. It's almost as if they're saying if you want to get away with illegal online activites all you have to do is NOT use IE.
"1 lifeguard for, say, every 45 kids at the pool, it's hard to watch them all at the same time."
At least 50:1 of kids to lifeguards. I had the privlage of working at the city pool during a few highschool summers, as the cook in the refreshments stand, so I didn't have to be anywhere the water area. I never cared much for swimming and once you work there and see what ends up in the pool, you don't want to have to touch the water with a 10' pole. "Somebody made a floaty"
It was/is an olympic size pool or very close with 6 lifeguard stands around the pool with 2 on "safety patrol" walking around the pool grounds and the other 2 at the first aid station. Three times as week was day camp day, all the summer day camps in the city showed up, close to 2500 kids. The camp counselors were suposed to watch their groups when they weren't in the pool, but they never did. There were other non-lifeguard staff there so it ended up being about 200:1 of kids running around to staff. And while in the pool they like to play the who can hold their breath the longest making it even more difficult for keep an eye on everyone. The only advantage was the deeper water was blocked off and only had the 3' diving board and slide and only one person was allowed to use each at a time and there was a lifeguard at each 1:1 in the "deep end" so it would not have been possible for there to be an unsupervised kid in 12'6" of water.
Even for pools of mostly 4' water underwater cameras would improve underwater visability, try looking into a pool with mid-day summer sun glare in your face, even with sunglasses. But you'd have to have to hire someone to stare at the monitors all day, once there's a budget to buy the system.
"Somehow I'm happy to accept cinema adverts yet not DVD adverts."
Probably has something to do with the theater previews being for future releases while the DVD content doesn't change and you end up with ads for something released many months ago. Its a carry over from VHS/Betamax, the only reason we're not used to it as with theaters is because they're new. The first time I saw this was with Shrek2, released less than a year ago while my oldest DVDs, SW ep1 and The Matrix do not. It's something movie studios just recently tried and it seems people are not liking it.
"In addition it's not against the law to get ripped off, which a consumer can always claim."
I wasn't "pirating" I guess I was just getting ripped off by those people who sold me a subscription to use BitTorrent claiming it was "100% legal". I remember reading about the RIAA suing someone because her daughter was using a paid version of Kazaa and thought it was legal because she was paying for it. If you use that claim you'd probably need receipts or credit card records to prove you realy were paying for it. In which case you'd probably just have to promise to delete the "infringing" material.
They just need to rebuild the city on a really big hovering platform over the old city and call it NEW New Orleans
"What we could is a Rome solution"
How about Simpsons a solution?
When the town(city) gets too poluted(flooded) everyone packs up and moves 5mi down the road.
(accual distance my vary by location)
When does it become cheaper scrap what was there and just start over somewhere else? 80% of the city flooded under as much as 20ft of water, billions in damages, possibly 9 weeks to pump out, not rebuild, just to make the ground dry again. By that time most of the structures will be even less safe for human inhabitation than they are now. Ok, this may not be popular with the New Orleans and southern LA residents, but rebuilding everything as it was is not going to address the problem of the river being diverted and not being allowed to flood, depositing sediment rebuilding up the land. I remember reading about how the nile used to flood in ancient history class, how did the Egyptions deal with seasonal river flooding until they built the Aswan High Dam? I think they were dealing with the floods for at least a couple thousand years. The population on the banks of the river was never that high, maybe we should take a hint, but waterfront property has such a high value, until it's under water. Unfortunately it usually takes a big disaster for people to really see the problem and change things, if you've ever seen "Modern Marvels Engineering Disasters" there are at least 12eps covering at least 3 disasters each. That's at least three doven things that took something reallly bad happening before it was changed for the better.
I'm guessing people are so used to having everything work they don't think about how it works, electricity and batteries. The wind and the rain and whatever the wind is blowing may or may not have that much effect on the signal sent by the cell phone safely tucked away in your pocket, but it will have an effect on the cell tower as it's being whipped around by the wind and random flying objects, I don't think cell towers can correct for doppler shift of the TOWER. I don't know if cell phone towers have backup power, but it can't last that long when the power lines connecting to it are blown away like a house of cards.
Fortunately the only loss of power I've had to deal with was the blackout in Aug 2003 and then only for a few hours. For some reason I was home at the time and since I had nothing else to do I moved my fan and bigger UPS over to the tv and watched to news coverage of the blackout, interestingly being broadcast to an audience who could not watch.
"and the infrastructure that SUPPORTS the phone"
of course no service provider is going to build for 100% usage, they only install enough lines for average use on an average day, I'll guess 35%, so when close to 100% of the customers need to make calls, usually when something bad happens only 35% can get an open line or it creates a buffer tower's OS crashes and no one can make a call.
I hope this doesn't sound like I'l trolling, but I heard many times of the mandatory evacualtion of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. When the governor orders the evacuation of an area when taking about a class 5 hurricare that would be a good time to listen and cover your home with enough plywood as possible and head for the hills or a designated shelter. If you don't listen you're going to be sitting on top of your house waiting for a coast guard helicopter to find you or clinging to a utility pole getting bitten by hundreds of fire ants also looking for shelter there and biting you until they win and you fall off. Yes, the LA gov said that on tv.
"or when something gets put back by a consumer"
yes, that would be very useful for finding the 'relocated' inventory. If you've ever worked in one of those big food stores you know it's true.
Back when I was in HS I worked a few summers at the local A&P, one of those big food stores for those not in the northeast. There was an excess of cashiers, for some reason they didn't hire people for other depts so a couple times a week some of us were temporarily reassigned for restocking the shelves. There was this one dept manager who for some reason didn't understand that when some customers decided they didn't want something, before they got to the checkout line, they would leave the item on the nearest shelf and she would blame us for not putting things in the right place she found a can of soup next to the peanut butter. It would have been nice to be able to walk down the isle with a scanner and have it beep whenever it detected an item in the wrong place or sensors in the shelves send a report "item '10lb frozen turkey' in isle 8 section 1 shelf 3(behind the 2L soda bottles)". And maybe a scanner for the impulse buy racks next to the checkout lines, it was funny to see how people whold try to hide things they didn't want in there instead of simply giving it to the cashier and saying "I don't want this anymore" or leaving it on the floor next to the shelves where it would be easily noticed by any of the store's staff.
Same with libraries, but they have signs asking you not to reshelf books, but well hidden books don't start to smell bad after a few days. They don't care where you put the book when you're done with it, on the empty bottom shelf or on the floor or on a table, but not back on the shelf where there's a chance it might be put in the wrong place.
That depends if you have the right paperwork. There are things called controled substances.
You can't legally drive a car or fly a plane without a license. You can't get some drugs without a perscription, in which case they're know as medication. You can't longer launch model rockets without a permit, think you need one from the FAA now. You have the right to bear arms, but it's illegal in enough states to do so without a gun owners license or permit or whatever the local ordinance calls them. Phone taps are illegal, but law enforcement and maybe P.I.s can get legal documents saying they can. So if someone thought their significant other was cheating and hired a PI, the PI might be able to get the necessary paperwork to use that or similar software. With the right paperwork, and paying the fees for it, you can do just about anything you want. It seems there people didn't have the right paperwork which it illegal. There's also the chance they were wanted for something else we're not being told about.
I didn't realize it was this bad, from m-w.com
hack
4 a : to write computer programs for enjoyment b : to gain access to a computer illegally
that's 4 a&b almost implying a connection: "to write computer prograams to gain access to a computer for enjoyment"
dictionary.com is a little better
2 Informal.
a. To write or refine computer programs
skillfully.
should be:
hack, v
1 to (skillfully) modify
to someone somewhere at some time this would be illegal: "I hacked my friend's computer to install another 5.25" floppy drive"
the definition of "hack" should be split into "hack" and "haxor" with "hack" getting the good parts and "haxor" getting the bad parts, the script kiddies.
In TOS he was 30 playing a 20-something Ensign Chekov, now he's almost 70, how's he going to play a 20 or 30-something Lt Chekov?
Yes, I've probably seen every episode and movie of TOS and B5 with Koenig in them and his work is very good. I just have to throw out the idea that it could be a bring in the big names stunt as was done with Enterprise in an attempt to draw back more viewers after it was moved to Friday where it had to compete with SG-1, not a good idea since enough people wanted to watch both. Is he going to stay with New Voyages or will it be a few guest staring appearances for the show's publicity?
"If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they?"
He can blacklist all he wants but we all know that most "piracy" and all pre-release "leaks" are inside jobs, NOT purchased. It happens when an CD or DVD or game disk sweatshop worker making maybe 50cents a day picks a slightly defective copy of something scheduled to be released next month out of the trash and sells it for a weeks wages to a group who uploads it to their warez site. Maybe a label was slightly out of place making it unsellable but the disk still works. Or some kid working in BestBuy or some other store pockets one that was damaged during shipping, enough items are, and is in too bad condition to even be sold as an open item. Or someone in a game rental store brings in their laptop and rips the disk during a break. Then they may sell their copy to some warez club who ends up with a copy of something 2-3days before store release. Can't forget the part-time teenager or even theater supervisor/manager working in the projector room in a theater who sets up a tripod and records it when the theater gets the film a few days before release to make sure it works. It's not "piracy" it's "employee theft" and employee theft happens because they feel exploited by their company. So the RIAA has disgruntled customers, employees and executives. (for not squeezing every last penny out of the customers) Why do they just disband already? I guess their making money, just not more money.
re-run
yes, that has a lot to with the iPod shuffle appearing to select(or not) some songs more then others in full random mode, but the subject says iTunes so I'm a bit confused. Maybe it's a hint that the iTunes prices should be increased to at least $1.49 so it will be cheaper to buy CDs and that guy will get more business. Sorry, there is no Homer Simpson advertising the Leftorium so it has enough business on the last possible day to survive. A Christian rock CD store, I wonder what state he's in and if he has Faith+1's murr alblum. (South Park)
$1.49 or make even $2.50 a track, this must be that "price flexibility" I read about last week. No, this is not price flexibility, it's a price hike, the only thing flexing will be the pockets of the record folks as they will with even more money. They already get 70% of the sale someone else makes, what more do they want, apparently a lot.
"But think about the artists!" I have no idea how their contracts work. Do they get a set amount or a percentage of sales if they don't get a % of sales, I don't want to hear the RIAA whining about the artists not getting paid, esp the ones with million dollar lifestyles.
Maybe if we put it in terms the general public will understand people will(might) listen. An increase from 99c to $1.49(at least) is a 50% price increase. People like 50% off sales, how about at 50% more sale? If they want to raise prices, maybe they can improve the track quality. The reason I don't buy downloadable music is the bulk of it is only 128kbps, but about increasing that by 50%, more would be nice, but that would be bad for someone's profit. The ipod doesn't 'have' to hold X thousand songs, yes the higher number is better for marketing, but lets be realistic.
"For people that use it 8 hours a day, and recharge daily... that's a considerably different matter. But that's not what I do."
yes, people should read the manual first, the commercials don't tell all, that's what the manuals are for. I got a 2gen 4gb mini in feb05, tha manual says battery life will varry depending on use and I recall reading somewhere that the estimated life is 500 charge cycle. I don't have and have never seen manual for a 1st of 2nd gen ipod. But we can't forget that people no longer research what they're going to buy, even the several hundred dollar purchases. Didn't all this start because some people in NY started complaining because their batteries started to show signs of age after 18months?
Hardware failure is around 2-5% so there are probably a couple people who really have faulty batteries and should get free replacements.
"and serious download penetration into the living room for there to be money in it now."
It's called "on demand" enough cable and satellite providers offer it. What needs to be determined is the value of this to the consumer and the content producers and providers. Most of it is $5 for 24hrs of use, I and I'm sure enough other paying consumers think that price is a little high, considering for 3 of those you can buy a new DVD.
It all comes down to pricing and availability/ convenience. How much is it worth to be able to quickly obtain a movie once? The providers may say $4.99, but the consumer may say, "I'm only going to watch it once, I'll give you 99c for it." There you have a consumer willing to pay, but considers the posted prices unreasonable.
What happens when someone records it when it's on tv, non-pay-per-view, and the legal time-shifted copy they have becomes corrupted, can they legally download another? What happens if the copy you made gets corrupted, can you download a recording someone else made because yours doesn't work anymore or what if it's not of the highest quality and want to use someone else's version? Or I have it on VHS and can't afford a tv card but want to watch it on my pc? Yes, lots of questions and the industry's answer is sue now, ask questions, maybe in court.
I'm going to stick to my tv/pvr card for tv and movies, if it's on tv I can make a legal recording for myself and used CDs for my listening pleasure.
offtopic-
Anyone know of a place selling used CDs of the Indiana Jones soundtracks, not the cheap "trilogy" collection or imported eds? They're not even on ebay